What is the search engine that 'sees' ALL internet-connected devices?
Security researchers from SEC Consult have found that some 'lazy' manufacturers of home routers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have reused the same sets of hard-coded encryption keys, leaving around three million IoT devices exposed to mass hijacking.
But… how did the researchers arrive at this number?
They discovered the devices thanks to Censys – a new search engine that scans the entire Internet daily looking for vulnerable devices.
Censys maintains a complete database of everything on the Internet
Censys is similar to the hacker search engine, Shodan, which is specifically designed to locate any device that has been 'inadvertently' connected to the Internet without the slightest attempt to prevent unauthorized access by third parties.
However, Censys uses a more sophisticated method to find vulnerabilities in devices and make the Internet a safer place.
Censys is a freely available search engine that was released in October by researchers at the University of Michigan and is supported by the world's largest search engine, Google.
But how does Censys work?
Censys collects information from hosts and websites through daily scans of the IPv4 address space – the version 4 internet protocol that routes the majority of Internet traffic today.
To achieve this, the search engine uses two tools:
ZMap – an open-source network scanner
ZGrab – an application layer scanner
ZMap scans over 4 billion IP addresses on the Internet and collects new data every day. It also verifies whether machines connected to the Internet have security vulnerabilities that should be fixed before they can be exploited by malicious hackers. It can also identify obvious flaws in conjunction with issues caused by IT administrator errors.
More information about the architecture and its capabilities can be found in the research paper published by the research team.
